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Things I can say–background, some characterization hints, history, and notes on craft. What shouldn’t be said is anything that’s a “hard spoiler” for the next book or the one I’m working on.
That’s difficult for me, sometimes–I don’t always* remember which detail is in which book, because the story as a whole (minus, unfortunately, some very important bits of Book V, but they’re coming) flows together. When, exactly, did I first mention Character R? When, exactly, did this confrontation occur, or that one–not in time, but in which book, in what chapter of which book?
So, though it was easy to pick snippets and avoid spoilers for the first couple of books in this group, it’s now much harder. And the intelligent and lively conversations going on here make it harder yet, because some of you are anticipating with somewhat scary accuracy. Not, yet, complete accuracy (and please–keep missing the mark at least a little, or why would I need to write the book?)
Food. Most of the spices mentioned are smerps, in that I made up new names for spices I’ve used. That’s because spice names came into English fairly late, and are strongly attached to their origins on this planet. I can’t see names like cumin, turmeric, saffron, cloves, cinnamon, etc. without thinking of where they are from, their trading history, etc. The same with many herbs–maybe it’s just me, but my botany background localizes herb names, and to call something basil (for instance) calls up every association with it, including specific cuisines. And yet–with the exception of two or three–I also can’t make up new flavors and put them in recipes. I can (and did) imagine a mix of two flavors in one spice.
So those who want to try making up Paksworld recipes probably need a list of the spices and herbs I use and imagined into the food. This won’t be the list (it’s too late to go pull everything out of the spice shelves…) But if the notion strikes you as useful, let me know.
Domestic livestock includes many strains/breeds of cattle, sheep, goats, and hogs, as well as domestic chickens (no turkeys.) Paks noticed some of the differences in the first book, but not all the varieties were given. Meat from these animals is eaten by all the cultures; there are no religious prohibitions against eating any of them, although there are individual and cultural preferences (and more wild game, and less domestic meat, is eaten in Lyonya.) Milk from cattle, sheep, and goats may also be used directly, or converted to cheese. Chickens are kept for both eggs and meat. Fish and other aquatic critters are eaten by those near rivers and the seacoast.
Wild foods: game, of course. The deer in the north are the European red deer, what we in the US call elk. Wild goat and sheep relatives live in the foothills and even up in the mountains and are hunted occasionally–their horns traded down into the lowlands, especially in Aarenis. Rabbit-equivalents, squirrel-equivalents. The larger wild birds. And wild plants–mushrooms, herbs, nuts, seeds, berries, wild fruits. Lyonya is a scavenger’s paradise, as the elves have planted edible and beautiful plants all through it, where they weren’t native, and removed most of the poisonous ones.
Flavorings in the north–native to the north–include herbs, bark of some trees, certain dried berries, mushrooms (sometimes flavoring, sometimes the main food), some roots. Onions and garlic are grown in gardens and found in wild form (ramps.) The spicier, hotter flavors come from Aarenis, where the wild native peppers have been grown and selected in gardens. But you can still walk out into the rougher pastures and find the wild forms–small berry-like fruits of red and yellow. Southerners preserve peppers in vinegar or in oil for cooking or condiments., and these are traded north. (I have a few wild peppers–chili pequins–in the yard here; we had a row of them in San Antonio, bird-planted, but also grew a variety from the mild banana peppers to the hotter ones. I can tell you that if you use chili pequins to make your salsa…you had better have an asbestos tongue.) Other herbs whose story-equivalents grow wild mostly in Aarenis are basil, oregano, and rosemary.
So what is “figan”? It’s a spice you’d put on cookies and other baked goods, but might also use in a grain dish (esp. if you put chopped mint in it) or even with some meat dishes, depending on location. In my mind, it’s like cinnamon with a little bit of cloves. Or maybe allspice.
Farron, the most expensive spice, is sortakinda like saffron except for the color, a rich magenta.
The favorite inn of the Company in the South, the White Dragon, is known for its cooking, and to soldiers on their first tour in the south, it’s exotic, full of unfamiliar flavors. But almost every inn has its specialties. Arvid, at first, had considered southern cooking over-spiced, but by the time he goes back north, he has changed his mind, and wishes he’d taken a few jars of southern sauces with him.
Comment by Naomi — April 7, 2012 @ 7:05 am
Thanks so much for this, great to get creative with spices, as you say, mention basil and one starts to think of every kind of recipe it’s used in. Hope, by the way that things are better for you now.
Comment by Daniel Glover — April 7, 2012 @ 7:18 am
Don’t worry about us guessing too closely. There’s always things that we’ve missed–like the one I woke up with this morning. 😉
Something about Easter weekend got me lazing about in bed this morning thinking about Paksworld.
Comment by Jenn — April 7, 2012 @ 7:44 am
Thank you for the cuisine info. I hope this will go into the people and places area of the website. It is just another reality factor I love about your world building.
Please don’t worry about me figuring out the pathway of your books. Subtly has never been one of my strong suits so I will be surprised as always as any of my speculations tend to be way off.
If you are not able to find suitable snippets from books 4 and eventually 5 how about some out takes from 1-3? I remember the blog about the chainsaw. I would be more than content with deleted scenes.
I was at the most striking Tenebrae service last night at one of the oldest churches in the city. It brought to mind your Mid winter when all the lights are extinguished. Prayed for you. Hope all is going better from you last blog.
Comment by elizabeth — April 7, 2012 @ 7:55 am
Jenn: Yes, the Maundy Thursday services are one of the elements entering into the Midwinter traditions of Paksworld, though not the only one. We were singing at that service in our church…the very formal, choreographed stripping of the altar, cleansing the altar, with only a dim light where the Altar Guild is working, and the rest of the church dark (and the choir is, for part of this, singing softly from the back) has enormous power. There’s no loud chattering when at last it’s done and everyone leaves.
Comment by Jonathan Schor — April 7, 2012 @ 2:18 pm
Don’t worry about snippets – we can learn patience.
The information concerning spices and food is really interesting.
Hope things are getting better for you and yours.
Comment by Tkil — April 7, 2012 @ 9:37 pm
Regarding questions like “when did I first mention R?”…
Do you have machine-readable versions of all the published books (and, presumably, latest versions of the manuscripts)? If so, have you tried using machine-based searching methods?
My background here is as a computer programmer. Over the 25+ years I’ve been in this business, I’ve had to learn new bodies of code (if I’ve been brought on as a maintainer / fixer / extender), and also have to wrangle large bodies of code that I wrote myself (but if I wrote it 2-3 years ago, I probably don’t remember all the details).
In both of these situations, the ability to do a full-text search is very helpful. In my world, a question might be as fundamental as “where is that function defined?” or as vague as “ok, do I already have code that deals with timestamps and serialization?” In your world, it’s a question like “when did I first mention R”?
It might be worth seeing if your computer can help you answer some of these questions. I know that I rely on it heavily to answer mine. 🙂
Good luck, and happy writing!
Comment by Kip Colegrove — April 8, 2012 @ 7:53 pm
Spices…
And the women brought spices to anoint his body, but…
Resurrexit sicut dixit.
Have a blessed Easter week.
Comment by elizabeth — April 8, 2012 @ 8:40 pm
Kip: Thank you!
One of the things that did not hit me strongly for years–growing up in a culture where bodies were simply whisked away by the funeral parlor and if seen again had had all the work done–was the specifics of how Jesus’ body was handled. It was there, I knew it, but I didn’t feel it.
Then we moved to this small town, and I was on the local ambulance crew…inevitable that I would see death, and see how some people handled the presence of a dead body in the house, on the lawn, in the barn, etc. It made a profound change in my own sense of life and death, of the poignancy of bodies, the pity and awe that they awake. When we had attempted a resuscitation that was unsuccessful, in someone’s home, one thing we could do was clean up the body. Take away all signs of the struggle, the mess that resuscitation makes, clean up the blood from IV starts, everything…and those parts of the Bible that talk about death–about bodies in tombs (Lazarus, of course, as well as Jesus) and the wrappings and the washing and the spices…now have concrete reality for me.
Two scenes in particular hit me with the full historical background of death and its traditions. But this isn’t the time to write about that. Maybe the ones we saved, at least for another day. Of those…the football player who was hit hard in a game and believed to have a broken neck and spinal cord injury–whose brother was quadriplegic after a car wreck. Kid was terrified, his dad was terrified…and I held his head, additional stabilization on the rough road we had to take, and talked to him about the game…and by the time we reached the hospital, he could move his legs. Rebirth of a family.
Comment by Elizabeth D. — April 8, 2012 @ 9:46 pm
It is interesting that you mention basil… which always reminded me of the herb theme in Lord of the Rings. Basil is the king’s herb; the Greek name for king is Basilios (sp? my husband is a much better speller of foreign words). The words for king (made famous on Good Friday) are Rex, Basilios, and Malek. There has been some concern that basil might be carcinogenic, but countries where it is eaten do not seem to have that problem, perhaps because of garlic. However, oregano and its relatives such as marjoram have been used for healing and prevention for many centuries in the Mediterranean areas, other herbs such as milk thistle (silymarin) are effective against liver toxins such as poison mushrooms, according to the German pharmacopia, and some herbs such as rosemary and cranberries are also antibiotics; but that is about the extent of my knowledge.
Somebody sent us an e-mail that said cinnamon and raw honey together would cure cancer; we looked it up on snopes, and sure enough, there was some mention of many properties of these two foods, but not proof of the specific dosage recommended by one article. My husband was willing to try anything; we got a supply of cinnamon and he ate it with raw honey for a month. His CEA (colon cancer enzymes) didn’t really show any difference though, but they weren’t really worse either, and he had been off his chemo for about a month (and not in remission).
I use herbs and spices for cooking all the time; I studied Indian music for awhile many years ago, which means that one also does housework and cooking, and learns about spices. Long ago, people grew as many herbs for medicine as for flavor, but doctors did not like the competition. Herbalists had some arguments about the effectiveness of a particular herb because of alarming symptoms. Hildegard von Bingen did not like one that is presently used as a cancer drug because this herb made people have upset stomachs and lose their hair, symptoms that can indicate that all fast-growing cells are also dying.
Alchemists (not ones that supposedly turned metal into gold, but those who were using herbal medicine) would soak an herb in distilled alcohol, like brandy, or in vinegar like a pickle, for months, but instead of making a simple cordial or pickle out of it, they would burn the solid materials until there was a fine white ash and recombine that with the rest, and let it sit for some more months, finishing it by adding sugar syrup (glucose). My husband made a wonderful raspberry cordial that way that tasted like the raspberries were fresh. Even though the method had provenance going back at least to the 14th century (better than for cordials), it did not win a prize because it was considered a “new” method (a method that others did not do). But our friends polished it off very happily. This sort of method is used in making Chartreuse, which combines many herbs, and there is a medicinal version. Some of those old recipes say “mercury” as a solvent, but they do not mean the metal at all, they just mean something that will dissolve the way mercury dissolves metal, such as alcohol or vinegar. No alchemist would eat the metal mercury. The alchemists did become rich, by selling their medicines. I’m sure that elves do things like that.
We are among a small minority that celebrates Easter this year a week later, but I wish you a Happy Pascha nonetheless. Our Easter is late because we have a late moon (well, the calendar for the moon is later, as well as the solar year). The calendar only makes sense as an annual celebration if people celebrate together anyway, so I’m willing to wait. The fire lights by itself (some say Greek fire; I’m not arguing) on Holy Saturday. It was happy chaos today on our Palm Sunday, but Holy Week becomes very difficult though intense. I have had a lot of sadness and frustrations the last couple of years, so I appreciate an opportunity to be able to cry a little, and then experience joy no matter how illogical it is.
Comment by Moira — April 9, 2012 @ 1:34 am
Easter greetings to y’all, and I hope it was a peaceful one. (And happy Sunday to those who don’t observe it.)
Speaking of rebirth, and the enormous power in the contrast of dark & light:
I was in Ireland last summer, and visited Newgrange. It is one of the largest neolithic passage graves in the world, in a part of Ireland that has a higher concentration of these sites than anywhere else in the world. More than five thousand years ago, the people built a chamber, passage and covering mound that was so well engineered and so precise that in fifty two centuries (in Irish weather!) not one drop of water has entered the structure. And of course, famously, it is aligned so that on one day each year, for seventeen minutes on the morning of the Winter Solstice, the rising sun shines in through the light box over the entrance, up the sloping passage, and illuminates the central chamber.
As part of the visit to this amazing place, you get to actually go into the mound and stand, closely packed, in the chamber – and then they do a recreation of the solstice. The artificial lights are extinguished so that the chamber is in complete darkness; the guide’s voice and the sound of your own breath are the only anchors to reality; and then, as the guide describes how the chamber may have been used for rituals of renewal, of faith and hope, a faint gleam of light starts to appear. The light gradually strengthens as it creeps slowly up the passage, until finally, at its peak, the chamber is bathed in a glow of life-affirming warmth. After a few magical moments, the light dims and recedes again; the darkness returns.
Only a lucky few are allowed to attend the actual Solstice each year, and their places are awarded by lottery. I can only imagine how moving that experience must be, because the recreation was powerful beyond anything I could have expected. And it defies imagination to think of those people five millennia ago, celebrating the rebirth of light and life with everything they had.
Humbling.
@Elizabeth – thanks for sharing the stories from your time on the ambulance crew. Also humbling. Maybe everyone should have to do something like that in their lives: it might make us better human beings.
Comment by Jenn — April 9, 2012 @ 7:33 am
This is always a powerful season for me. When you care for the elderly, death and dying is a constant. There really is something profound about accompanying a person to the threshold of eternity. Afterwards, preparing their body respectfully. We pray while washing their bodies and I have often perfumed them and never thought of it in the sense of spices. I will have to keep that in mind now.
Comment by elizabeth — April 9, 2012 @ 11:37 am
Moira: What an experience! Thanks for the details in the telling. If I ever get back across the ocean, I will try to see Newgrange.
Jenn: We never perfumed them (maybe the context of medical?) but we did try to make them decent. When my mother died, a friend and I cleaned her and dressed her in clean slacks and shirt, for transport to the funeral home. I was grateful to have had the experience with others before then. (She had helped me come to grips with the first ones I saw, having been a nurse herself.)
Comment by elizabeth — April 9, 2012 @ 11:45 am
Elizabeth D. By whatever calendar, Holy Week is difficult for those who take it seriously and journey through that week…(and it’s difficult not to cry when you need to, but you’re in the choir, and crying prevents good singing. May your Easter be as joyous for you as ours was for us.
And fascinating information about making cordials. I’ve done a little pickling, and know people who’ve done more, but did not know about burning the solids to ash and adding that back in. Was the sugar syrup made with honey?
Comment by Moira — April 9, 2012 @ 10:24 pm
Yes, Newgrange is definitely worth a visit. That whole area is chock full of things to see, if you’re a history nut, so I highly recommend it. What struck me, after 20+ years in the States, was how close together everything is – it didn’t seem that way back in the day. Just an entirely different scale of things entirely.
Re: cordials and such – fascinating that you were able to find & recreate such an old method to make them. (I’d have been a very willing taste tester! :)) I knew Chartreuse was originally made as a medicinal drink, but when my brother brought back a bottle from a trip, many years ago, frankly it was enough to put you off for life! I guess I was just too young / it was just too strong. (But then medicine isn’t supposed to taste good…) I think that bottle is still sitting in my dad’s house! But I completely agree about the wealth of knowledge available to us from herbalists and their ilk: sadly, much of that knowledge was forbidden centuries ago by the church which associated it with outlawed pagan beliefs / saw it as a threat to the church’s authority. And since most of the people who could read & write were clergy of one sort or another, and many of the people who could / would have passed the information on orally were put to death, their ban was pretty effective. (Interesting sidebar: historians now think that a majority of the poor women who were burned as witches in medieval times were in fact wisewomen – herbalists and other traditional healers – who clung to the old ways, refused to kow-tow to the church and paid the price. So tragic.)
As for honey: YUM. I haven’t much experience in this area, but any and every drink I’ve ever had that featured honey was absolutely delicious. I’ve also used it in baking as a substitute for sugar, and again the results were yummy. (Now my mouth is watering.)
Comment by Elizabeth D. — April 10, 2012 @ 11:51 am
When I posted the herbal post, I must have been writing at the same time that you put up your wonderful post about cleansing the dead. What a moving experience! Thank you. And all the more moving that you were able to care for your mother that way. Many of the prayers of the wake were used during the time of washing the body, which was part of the original preparation rites.
When we were first married, my husband told me about some of the New York Irish traditions. Families used to have the wakes in their homes, and sometimes they would set the corpses on ice, but the melting ice would make the corpse almost sit up at some point. So some people added to that, by “wiring the empties.” If a person had given the deceased trouble during life, the corpse would be wired to sit up and wave when that person came to visit. Nobody ever admitted to such a practice, however. Family wakes were always both sad and happy; often big family reunions, with lots of reminiscences, laughter and tears. Kris comes from an Irish family that lived in Coney Island, NY for a few generations. The family sold the Wonder Wheel to a Greek family (who we also knew)… Brooklyn is a very small town.
Kris is the main cordial maker in the family. The trick is not to add back any black ashes that have components that are not healthy, but only those that have turned completely white, so they must be burned over high heat in a metal bowl for as long as it takes. It is called calcination, although not because it is calcium but only the color white. He has ruined a couple of metal bowls. I recommend that the process be done outdoors, because it will set smoke alarms off. We have a little propane burner that we use for camping; that is great for the purpose. The white ashes dissolve into the alcohol that is already well on its way to being a cordial.
About the sugar: We read somewhere that when sugar is dissolved and heated, the fructose changes to glucose; I’m not sure if that is true, but sugar of some sort is added to cordials, and it is most common to use sugar syrup. We have tried it a couple of ways, and friends argue which way to do it. We always use raw sugar. Friends of ours that are better vintners make nice melomels which use honey; although honey has its own properties, it would probably taste very nice in a cordial. Everything is a matter of experimentation.
We have also tried different forms of alcohol as the dissolving agent, and found that a simple brandy is much better at extracting an herbal essence than something with high alcohol content (no “Ever-clear”); the essence of grapes seems better than vodka. It is rather expensive though, because distillation is illegal, so we must buy the brandy; we’ve been using Christian Brothers, but any simple brand would do.
One of my favorite cordials was made by blending a few cordials that used different herbs such as coriander seeds and rosemary among others. Kris would remember what. We have also tried other experiments, such as edible flowers, but not all experiments taste very good or seem to have enough of the original ingredients. One time a person who was allergic to a flower and didn’t know it, had a very bad reaction, the only time that has ever happened, so we caution people to know what they are able to eat before drinking a concentrated version of it. The rest of us loved it. We never drank very much at a sitting, but now Kris can’t drink any of it.
Although there is little to prove that the alchemical method works, it does taste good. In nature, there is constant alchemy. Grapes turn to raisins and plums to prunes that mysteriously have iron after this process. Women used to eat sources of silicon such as radishes (Rapunzel) or horse tail (equisetum) to bring more milk. Chickens will scratch in mica to make stronger calcium eggshells. The entire idea of the herbal spygerics is to dissolve and then recombine in an intrinsic unity, not an extrinsic unity. A French scientist named Kervran measured elements in the case of raisins, plums, chicken eggs, and several other instances, back in the 1960s. Other scientists then did not accept his work, but these days, whenever my husband would do a lecture on it (we used to go to Pennsic), there were always several scientists in the audience wanting to know more. Kris knows several book titles that have more information.
Comment by Elizabeth D. — April 10, 2012 @ 12:40 pm
I asked my husband Kris for some references. Although I admit that we have a Christian bias, the reason he does not like the 20th century occult views is that they added their own interpretations to treatises, and changed some things. Generally, we do not have biases of that kind, except when changes have been made. Some of the alchemists were monks, and not discouraged by their monasteries. Kris says:
“All material on Alchemy requires a strainer because of 20th century occult accretions. Spagyrics tend to be viewed as okay by the churches, but the lead into gold was only accepted if it went into the collection plate. Flamel left at least one “alchemical gold” chalice which turns out to be heavily alloyed.
“I like ‘The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony’ but it is cryptic. Anything by Basilius Valentinus is good. Most material purportedly by de Germain is spurious. Paracelsus was a devout Christian and his work is relatively clear. Available is another matter: most of the available stuff is occultism added to alchemy: misleading.”
Comment by Moira — April 10, 2012 @ 3:26 pm
The problem with being a history nut is that you can’t really, truly, know anything! (Unless you were actually there, of course.) We humans always have at least one bias, usually more, and we rarely record anything without some of that bias creeping into our accounts. So I agree, it doesn’t matter who wrote it or when, you have to try to read “between the lines” to get a sense of what really happened.
Wouldn’t it be fascinating to be able to go back in time? (Not forward, as that would screw things up right royally…) I think we might all be surprised at some of the things we’d see and hear.
Re: monks as alchemists – bearing in mind that we’re using a wide definition of alchemists (I prefer herbalists in this particular sense, but no matter) then absolutely, yes. Remember, Chartreuse comes from a monastery! This is one reason that non-clerical herbalists were regarded with such suspicion and distrust by the Church: is their Kung Fu greater than ours?! It would never have done for an “ignorant” illiterate non-conformist old woman living alone in the woods to know more about healing than the the good brothers with their prayers and devotions.
(Sorry if I sound like I’m on a rant against religion: not my intent, I’m just making a point. I do have serious problems with how religion can be used in very negative ways – fundamentalism, anyone? – but at the end of the day, those are problems with human nature, not necessarily with religion per se. So apologies to anyone who might have been getting ready to be offended. If we all kept an open mind and shared knowledge, the planet might have clean air, clean water, clean power, and we might be settling the stars by now…)
And just to tie all of this back to Paksworld, there’s an obvious parallel with how the Old Humans had so much knowledge and power of sorts (parrions, healing abilities) which was to a large extent lost in the wake of the Magelords’ arrival and takeover. It should never be a choice between one or the other: the whole, or the combination, is always greater than the sum of the parts.
And on that note, if I ever meet any of you in person, remind me to tell the one about Pythagoras the Indian chief. 😉
Comment by Jenn — April 11, 2012 @ 8:52 am
Elizabeth D,
I once had an 90 yr old woman tell me a story of when she was a young woman sitting vigil with a dying man at night. When he died she tied a scarf around his head to hold his jaw closed and pinned it. When she turned to leave he rolled over. She had also pinned the scarf to her skirt!
Comment by Elizabeth D. — April 11, 2012 @ 1:45 pm
I agree with you Moira, but the books he was referring to as mixing occult things into alchemy were written in the 19th and 20th centuries and purposely changed things. It wasn’t the source of the authors of those books, but their changes that were a problem, and these often had little relation to the methods and herbal knowledge that the women herbalists had.
He also added an author, Manfred Junius, and I asked why he wasn’t on the list before, and he said that it upsets him that Manfred Junius died in his 90s but had no students; but his books are wonderful.
As to women herbalists, yes, they kept many people alive and safe including women in childbirth; when they were not allowed to practice anymore, the deaths in childbirth and infant mortality went way up. These grandmothers were the reason that the human race survived, we owe them a great debt, because any species that must wait so many years before puberty, but is attacked by so many illnesses and accidents, must have knowledge to survive. Think of some of the tribes that are dying out today because of accidents or disease; overpopulation is the headline, but the dying out of small tribes should also be. At one time, the only reason any religion became prominent was because it would heal the sick. Even after losing some of its techniques, the churches at least funded hospitals. In my opinion, there is too little of that today, and it must become a higher priority.
I am also disturbed that in almost every century, herbalists and alchemists have had to be secretive about their work; there are always “authorities” that play politics with healing, and their policies kill people. I find myself on the side of the herbalists.
Just think about the healing properties of these plants:
“Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet, and so are you.” (Roses and violets have a high amount of vitamin C, sugar helps in dehydration, and people also have power within them to heal others.)
Comment by Sam Barnett-Cormack — April 11, 2012 @ 5:11 pm
I tell you one thing I’d really love you to write about (though I can see that you might want to wait until the new books are done) is the themes you feel you’ve written into the books. Not necessarily what you meant to put there, but what you see there now.
For me, I see the central sense of Paks herself as redemption – but not in the sense of redemption from sin, or not only it – redemption from all sorts of negatives. The Verella Thieves Guild was redeemed in a miracle she was at the centre of, and the events around it – and Arvid in particular. She redeems Kieri of his lost identity. She herself is redeemed from despair, and all the negatives she sees in her state, but also redeemed from her pride. She even begins the redemption of magery in the Girdish lands through Dorrin.
Heck, I could see her becoming a Saint in her own right, with a province along those lines. She certainly seems to have a more direct connection to the High Lord than other paladins, and her deeds extend beyond the province of Gird.